John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

Tag Archive for 'google'

It was announced yes­ter­day that Google Maps’ Street Viewcomes to more cities, includ­ing Boston. So nat­u­ral­ly, I looked up our pre­vi­ous apart­ment in Cam­bridge, MA. The weird thing is that myself, and our friends/upstairs neigh­bors Tyler and Sarah are pic­tured!

We’re hav­ing our mov­ing sale, and that’s my Saab in the fore­ground. I can prob­a­bly peg the date tak­en to August 11th or 12th, 2007 – the week­end before we moved.

Click the pho­to to see notes, look at it big, or check it out on Google Maps your­self. I am a lit­tle creeped out.

Now that I’m work­ing full-time (more on that soon), I don’t have as much time to loll about and read every­thing that comes into my RSS read­er. Rather than unsub­scrib­ing from all of the triv­ial stuff, why not cre­ate a “high pri­or­i­ty” label in Google Read­er, and apply it to the “can’t miss” feeds? Matt Wood explains this strat­e­gy on 43 Fold­ers:

“If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind miss­ing, and some of which I want­ed to read every sin­gle word, I should orga­nize them that way, not by their puta­tive sub­ject areas.”

Noth­ing wrong with keep­ing a long list of oth­er labels, (sports, nyc, pho­tos, etc.), but by adding this new label, it’s easy to pri­or­i­tize the impor­tant feeds. Then, when I get time, I can catch up on Julia and Jakob.

I don’t know many Amer­i­cans that use Jaiku, a Twit­ter-like ser­vice that allows you to micro-post your day from the web, or mobile phone. But, with the announced acqui­si­tion of the Finnish com­pa­ny by Google, I bet more will take a look.

A Q&A on the deal is avail­able on the Jaiku site, but they are freez­ing new sign-ups for now.

Jeez, Google is branch­ing out in to all kinds of new busi­ness­es… the lat­est is a ven­ture to pro­vide the world with a secure WiFi con­nec­tion, espe­cial­ly use­fule in pub­lic places.

Dubbed Google Secure Access, it pro­vides a free VPN con­nec­tion to Google. Some observers are already ques­tion­ing Google’s com­mit­ment to user pri­va­cy, which gives pause — but, I for one, would love such a ser­vice. Too bad the down­load is avail­able only for WIn­dows.